The paintings here employ an "ornamental" approach to painting, meaning "beautiful and harmonious" brushstrokes. They also draw inspiration from the shapes and forms of circuitry and technical contraptions, as well as from the shapes of protruding insect parts. This confluence suggests in part that they are equally bizarre to an anthropocentric eye.

I am fascinated by what I'm calling "ornament," since so much that surrounds us seems decorative rather than useful or utilitarian. This "ornament" embellishes our daily lives, almost unavoidably. Perhaps it is analogous to the way in which we decorative humans are superfluous to the prions that are working away underneath it all.

Especially in the early paintings here I use artificial colors, that don't tend to occur in nature, to avoid mere documentary representation.

Ornamental / Technoid / Insectoid

ORNAMENTAL FRAGMENTS (competing with each other and other entities)2016 - work in progressAcrylic, dispersion and household paint on canvas60" x 72", 152 x 182 cm

This painting is a by-product of working on other paintings. I use leftover paint on brushes and diverted attention (or next to no attention) to continue working on it. The thumbnails show earlier stages of the painting from 2015, 2014 and 2011.

Schopenhauer or Picasso or Mies van der Rohe or... supposedly said that "symmetry is the art of the primitive" (or of the allegedly simple-minded or naïve, for that matter). Luckily, this painting is not symmetrical.